A scalable method for router attack detection and location in link state routing

The routing table poisoning attack is one of the most devastating and least researched topic among Internet attacks, which needs immediate research attention. In this paper, we develop a scalable method for detecting router attacks and locating the malicious routers (within a small bounded set of nodes) in link state routing protocols. We carry out analytical and simulation studies to evaluate the proposed secure link state protocol (SLIP) for two performance metrics, viz. attack detection probability and fault detection time, under different network and attack scenarios. Our studies show that the SLIP offers a very high attack detection capability with a little degradation in fault detection time compared to the link state protocol.